Resisting Erasure from American Petroecologies:

Abstract

ABSTRACT During America’s transition to fossil fuels, the early novels of American literary naturalism served an ideological function for fossil capital’s (Malm 2016) emerging middle class. The works of authors such as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser – while critical of the period’s worst excesses – naturalise the fossil fuel-based identities, economic relations, and cultural practices which effected forms of socioenvironmental erasure on racialised communities. This article examines the ways in which Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) subverts the naturalist form to reveal attempted erasures of black populations from aspects of urban life. In his depictions of Chicago’s petroecology (an environment shaped around relations between people and petroleum-based technologies), Wright’s inversion of naturalism’s ideological stance foregrounds the racial exclusions that structure America’s urban spaces through alienation in geography, media, and labour practices. By focusing on the characters’ positions within Chicago’s petroecology, this article presents Native Son as an ideological challenge to America’s fossil-fuelled whiteness.